ASTERISK KWON, Unsplash.
The relations between the center and the periphery in the world capitalist system have changed significantly in recent decades. This was driven by the financialization of capitalism during the transition from the Fordist regime of accumulation to the post-Fordist one. Financialization was coupled with globalization as the export of Western industry to the world periphery, the so-called Global South, which in some cases, aided by industrialization, elevated itself to the semi-periphery. In this process, capitalists from the USA, the leading capitalist country in the post-World War II period, took the lead. The establishment of a strong financial “industry” alongside the export of productive industry – necessitated by the costs of the Vietnam War and the inclusion of Black people within the framework of civil rights – enabled the dollar to persist as the world's reserve currency. The global bourgeoisie invested its financial surpluses on Wall Street, and the opaque amounts of money, along with the development of computer equipment and the new calculation capabilities it brought, fueled an expansion of financial trading that could no longer be covered by the real economy.
Immigrants, who are important not only as active labor but also as a reserve army of labor relegated to lumpenproletarian activities, are becoming a problem that the radical right wants to solve through deportations, while the liberal or extreme center seeks to solve it through a mixture of repression and integration into a utopian multicultural society of the future.
Part of this integration project are, of course, the publicly funded cultural industries, including the literary one. In recent years, we can speak of a certain turn in the direction of influence within the global literary field. Whereas once literatures from the periphery had to gain the approval of the gatekeepers of the center to begin aspiring to the Western canon and readership markets, today the center itself is questioning its own canon and striving for a plurality of addressed identities. This is likely both a consequence of integration efforts and a means of sidelining class struggles and obscuring racial inequality within a semblance of multicultural coexistence and false empowerment. What we often overlook in this regard is that the participation of so-called minority voices in the literary industry does not substantially change the situation of the proletarian and lumpenproletarian masses.
Literary stars from the Global South, within these cultural power relations conditioned by material ones, play the role of producing assimilation ideology. They often thematize the split between two worlds, their criticism and longing for the homeland simultaneously, while also expressing sympathy for liberal values and criticism of the Global North. Although both sides are subject to criticism, its ideological matrix is broadly liberal-bourgeois, meaning it stems from hegemonic imperialist ideology. The center is criticized for not realizing its liberal ideals and not accepting newcomers as it should; the homeland is criticized for lagging behind in one way or another, although it is basically more hospitable and perhaps even sympathetically warm, naive, and uncorruptedly humane. There are many examples of works of this kind. I will give only the most recent one I have read, namely Kaveh Akbar’s acclaimed debut novel, Martyr!. The protagonist is Cyrus, an Iranian-American poet who, following the deaths of both his parents, struggles with an existential crisis and alcohol addiction. Although homoeroticism is a classical, non-taboo subject in the literature of the Middle East, the novel seems to force its Iranian characters somewhat awkwardly into contemporary identity politics. Thus, Cyrus’s missing mother turns out, without any organic contextual development, to have been a lesbian in Iran in the 1980s who later became a major performance artist in the United States. Although it is of course clear that homoerotic attraction between women exists in Iran as well, this trajectory is presented in an artificial and inorganic manner, through a clichéd pursuit of Western pop culture and its underlying assumptions about life. To make matters more pointed, Cyrus himself ultimately finds both spiritual and sexual resolution in a homoerotic relationship. On the other hand, we have Cyrus’s uncle, who suffers from PTSD as a result of his service in the Iran-Iraq War. There, he served as an actor playing the role of an angel of death, dressed in a black cloak and holding a lamp directed at his face as he comforted soldiers dying senselessly. Such “angels” did not, of course, exist in the war that the United States helped fuel through its support for Iraq—it is a purely Orientalist invention. Although the novel clearly takes a position against American imperialism, it nevertheless remains within the typical liberal categories of successful novels by authors with migrant backgrounds: military resistance to imperialism is portrayed as senseless and caricatured, yet, despite the fact that the new homeland is a cold stepmother, it nonetheless offers both Cyrus and his mother a form of salvation—albeit an ambiguous one—through its own categories and predetermined scripts.In this sense, the novel seems almost tailor-made for the progressive audience of the imperial center, since it relativizes that audience’s own position of power. This is, a caricatured scheme. But we will rarely encounter successful works from the Global South on the literary markets of the Global North that emerge from a proletarian or peasant perspective and a "traditional" value framework: very often, however, we will encounter works that celebrate rebellion against local norms.
The inhabitants of the boring, non-exotic, wealthier semi-periphery, who are a marginal part of the global minority of the Global North, the losers of post-socialism in an identity crisis, are in an unenviable position. We write in small languages and have no interesting exotic stories (towards the end of the text, I will try to show why these are not necessary for a good book).
Local authors try to transfer these standards into the Slovenian language, but due to poorer working conditions, a smaller talent pool, and a certain degree of inorganicity and provincialism, they cannot offer equally quality products – by industrial standards, of course. Even if these books are awarded and validated by mainstream critics and academics, who have less and less influence in the public sphere: literary criticism is disappearing from classical media such as major newspapers, national radio, television, and online media. Regardless of the attempts of local subsidized culture to keep pace with the international literary industry, complaints about the people not reading enough works of Slovenian authors and the declining influence of criticism are only intensifying.
Reading such works, which are essentially a non-industrial copy of industrially refined literature, seems less and less meaningful for discerning and critical readers and literature lovers. As a critic and author placed in a minority community, I face my own resistance to contemporary, industrial, non-challenging variants of so-called minority or immigrant literature and its local imitations. Namely, they reduce the comprehensive subjective and social experience merely to a simplified, one-dimensional identity marker, which is usually also conditioned by the perspective of the middle and upper classes. I certainly do not think that the minority experience is not worthy of literary treatment; on the contrary, it is still more than necessary, as the world is rapidly turning away from liberal grand narratives towards ethnonationalist ones. However, for a truly subversive effect (so that it does not merely fall into the general, worn-out, commercialized, and ubiquitous category of the "subversive"), it must escape assimilation discourses and produce actual deviations, escape the "token" position.
As a critic and reader in recent years, I have also been facing the fact that in the most celebrated international works, I do not find real value, regardless of their formal sophistication. Despite the apparent multiplicity of identities and experiences they are supposed to contain, in most of them I observe a limited perspective of an international one-dimensional middle-class member, a Nietzschean last man, a man at the end of history who no longer questions his own subjectivity and criticizes only within categories and concepts that are already given. This increasingly seems to me like the literature of inertia. A partial example might be Kaveh Akbar’s early novel Martyr!. Subjectivity is presented as the ultimate horizon, while its cultural and metaphysical presuppositions are not questioned in any way. The protagonist is a “last man” concerned with cultivating his own soul against a completely desublimated backdrop that fails to depict the epochal processes that brought about this very condition and instead takes them for granted.
Conversely, I find more and more meaning in literature that has a harder time breaking through both into international circulation and into the circulation of the most institutionalized and award-winning domestic literature; literature that is not overdetermined by the ruling ideology of the center. In novels and poetry that possess a certain singularity, original subjectivity, and the courage for genuine distance from literary form. A distance that stems from the inability to write a so-called masterpiece due to the material conditions of domestic literary production, or to simply sheer indifference to the idea of the masterpiece.
With this, I certainly do not mean to say that such works are directly substantively or ideologically opposed to the works of recognized international literature, that they oppose the mixing of cultures, or retreat into ideological conservatism or a focus solely on local events. Rather, they are an organic expression of the contemporary, extremely complex, and contradictory world, which includes both the experience of neoliberal globalism and local identities. These are works that are perhaps more conflicting in their implications, more searching, which results in formal unconventionality, perhaps even unfinishedness. But this unfinishedness does not necessarily appear as a shortcoming; it can be a productive source of interpretation.
I will present the example of two recent poetry collections by Slovenian authors that position themselves at the relative margins of an already marginal poetic scene. Both are particularly suitable for our discussion because they engage directly with the specific spatiality of the post-socialist semi-periphery. One collection, named Mariborska, is centered on Mariborska Street in the city of Celje, where the poet grew up; the other is devoted to Ljubljana and its urban districts.
Critical common sense often lingers on the sheer number of poetry collections published by Matej Krajnc. This productivity is sometimes treated as something inherently negative or undesirable. I would argue, however, that such prejudice says less about Krajnc's oeuvre than about petty-bourgeois conceptions of art and the artist, according to which the artist ought to cultivate an aura of mystery and consecration. His collections are expected to generate longing and anticipation for yet another original encounter with the author's genius. Repetition and "hyperproduction" are perhaps perceived as an unbecoming willingness to serve one's work on a platter, contrary to the aura of inaccessibility. One review of Krajnc's poetry even condescendingly raised the question of what should be done with the surplus of his books. Such a critical position stems from a conception of criticism as something that ought to defend literary public morality against excesses, rather than from a genuinely curious critical engagement with the literary phenomena at work in the texts themselves.
Krajnc's originality lies precisely in desublimation, in his persistent resistance to every form of aestheticization, in a cynicism and irony infused with elements of the absurd that repeatedly collide with the limits of subjectivity, producing a kind of atmospheric machine, an intra-textual Beckettian state of existence. His poetry journeys inward not in order to expose intimacy, but to uncover the banal, worthless corners, the discarded residues of subjectivity.
Mariborska Street in Celje, together with Kidričeva Street, which intersects it, is one of the town’s two principal thoroughfares leading elsewhere. Rather than hiding at the margins, these broad, busy roads cut through the urban fabric, constantly reminding us of the town's transitory character and provincial status, of the fact that "life" is happening somewhere else. Mariborska Street also forms one side of the rectangular Gaberje district, where I, too, grew up. Before the Second World War, Gaberje was the city's first working-class neighborhood; later it became associated with various marginalized groups and the lumpenproletariat—displaced Roma communities, alcoholics, eccentrics, a handful of blue-collar workers, and "čefurji" (a colloquial and often pejorative term for immigrants from the former Yugoslavia), although the neighborhood's image has improved somewhat over time. As teenagers we called it the "Gaberje Bronx," a phrase that also appeared in a crudely painted "famous" graffiti, now preserved in the permanent exhibition on the history of Celje at the Museum of Recent History.
The environment of Mariborska Street, both on the Gaberje side and elsewhere, is not one of meaninglessness but rather of an entirely different construction of meaning—one that spontaneously draws nourishment from what has been discarded: from the Dickensian architecture of old industrial complexes, the creaking company flags in quiet nights, the morbid stillness of the city, the cold warehouse halls, the smell of evaporating summer concrete mixed with soot, the abandoned and vandalized Golovec cemetery, the dried weeds growing along the roadsides.
Such an environment does not produce nostalgic or coherent autobiographical narratives. Above all, it produces cynicism toward them. Krajnc descends into landscapes of memory—to the years of growing up, to records bought on the Yugoslav market, visits to relatives, old family houses that have since been demolished, and the urban landscape of Celje. Yet every image is stripped of sentimentality and personal attachment; in the very next moment it is threatened with becoming the object of playful linguistic experimentation or mere referentiality. Nothing is sacred—neither childhood, nor old age. The strength of this approach lies in the fact that it attacks nothing, grows indignant over nothing; it merely plays, waiting for a poetic and subjective Godot while hoping never to encounter him.
This ironic juxtaposition of the supposedly elevated and the banal is already evident in the opening poem of the first section (following the "Intro"), entitled "To America":
buy a ticket
sail to America
or simply walk along the pavement
a few house numbers back
timber industry warehouses
bus station
America
On the one hand we encounter the American Dream, which the poetic subject—constructed from the biographical figure of Matej Krajnc—consumes through vinyl records. These later inspire him to become a singer-songwriter. Yet the gap between the mass popularity and prestige of stars such as Bob Dylan and the marginality of Krajnc's own musical practice is mirrored in the juxtaposition of the country America and the local bus stop bearing the same name. The referential richness becomes even greater if one belongs to the "inner circle"—if, for example, one grew up in Gaberje or is a resident of Celje familiar with this area through lived experience. Next to the warehouses today stands one of Celje's most popular restaurants, Amerika, which, ironically, serves primarily Serbian cuisine and radiates a distinctly "Balkan" atmosphere filled with the smell of vast quantities of grilled meat. In short, it represents the complete opposite of glamorous Hollywood celebrity culture. The collection offers an entire range of such (self-)ironic moments, which implicitly function as a cultural critique of the disparities between center and semi-periphery, between petty-bourgeois poetic or pop-cultural ideals of stardom and the lived reality of an ordinary inhabitant of Celje—a resident of a small town in a small country who came of age during the decadent phase of Yugoslav socialism.
The collection is divided into several sections corresponding to somewhat different thematic and mnemonic clusters, and contains poems in a variety of forms. Some are long and entirely free verse; others freely reinterpret traditional poetic and metrical forms. All, however, bear the mark of Krajnc's already noted mastery of form, sound, and avant-garde techniques, as well as his understanding of their role in constructing aesthetic effects. This is therefore a collection that will most strongly resonate with those who are "Gaberčani" in spirit, while at the same time steadfastly maintaining its marginal and niche position—one that remains largely inaccessible to many other readers of poetry, itself already a marginal literary genre today. It seems to me that precisely by disregarding the "rules of respectable conduct," Krajnc fulfills the contemporary purpose of poetry. At a moment when society no longer expects anything from poetry, poetry can begin to reward the marginal figures among us—those who, like the "Gaberčani," originate from the periphery. The inhabitants of Celje, a city toward which it is often difficult to feel the kind of nostalgia for youth prescribed by popular cultural norms.
Conceptually akin to it is Nejc Pohar's poetry collection Čka, in which each poem is dedicated to one of Ljubljana's urban districts. The difference, however, is that this collection is devoid of irony. Its poems unfold in long, Ginsbergian lines, yet without the sense of exuberance typically associated with Ginsberg. These lines incorporate meaningful linguistic play and references to contemporary socio-political realities. They evoke an atmosphere of slow decline, the consolidation of power, and the emergence of an urban oligarchy, in which the city center is characterized by superficial comfort and an illusion of openness, while the remaining districts are left to gradual decay. Each poem is preceded by a black-and-white photograph taken in the district it depicts.
The collection is difficult for outsiders to access: readers who are not from Ljubljana—let alone international audiences unfamiliar with contemporary Slovenian politics—are unlikely to grasp many of its references, while its linguistic wordplay often resists translation. Even the title, Čka, is highly specific. It derives from Ljubljana slang, in which speakers sometimes pronounce only the final syllable of a word. Čka is the final syllable of the Slovenian vulgarism pička ("pussy"), although within the poems it acquires additional connotations. Yet it is precisely this radical locality that gives the collection its force and intensity. Its living poetic voice emerges through an embrace of insider knowledge and a self-conscious exclusion from the global literary system.
Both collections are marked by a kind of semi-peripheral nightmare: one of decaying comfort, world-historical marginality, and, above all, the liminality characteristic of the global semi-periphery. They are particularly compelling because they exist beyond the established framework of literary relations between the Global North and the Global South.
If, as we have tried to show, the world literary system is dominated by a class-conditioned division between the global center and the periphery, then, as I have tried to demonstrate in the introduction, small semi-peripheral literatures can offer a new perspective on globalization. However, they can hardly do so by entering the world literary market, both because of linguistic constraints and because of their own internal literary and thematic particularities. Their role can therefore be understood primarily as one of empowering domestic readerships and as a starting point for reflecting on the value of small languages.Class division also cuts across the representation of migrants, dividing them into those deemed worthy of representation and those who are not. In small languages, like Slovenian, therefore, besides authors who have a minority origin or identity but are neither part of the current canon nor the original literary history, instead forming their own (sub)culture, there also appear authors who belong to the majority ethnic group but are a minority with respect to the trends of globalized culture. It seems, then, that by remaining committed to the liminality of our semi-peripheral position and by focusing on our local microworlds, we may in fact situate ourselves more effectively within the world-historical reality of contemporary globality—a reality in which we are inevitably always already moving, even if beyond the spotlight.
Muanis Sinanovic
Sources:
Hirsch, Joachim. Herrschaft, Hegemonie und politische Alternativen. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2002.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. London: Bodley Head, 2023.
Amin, Samir. Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018.
Pohar, Nejc. Čka. Ljubljana: Črna skrinjica, 2025.
Krajnc, Matej. Mariborska. Ljubljana: Književno društvo Hiša poezije, 2025.
